One Theme at a Time
This is more a note to myself than anything else, but I bet some other aspiring WordPress theme designer will make the same error sometime, so it’s becoming a short tutorial.
OK, so here are the steps you should follow:
- Make one WordPress theme. Be completely satisfied that nothing is missing from it and nothing is superfluous. Then move on to another theme.
And you’re done. Pretty neat, huh?
If you’re wondering why I feel the need to make a tutorial for something so obvious, consider my process:
- Make one WordPress theme (BWO). Get it to OK, but fail to add all that’s necessary and remove all that is not.
- Make a theme that’s based on the original (BWO_doodle).
- Revise original theme by adding some things it was missing.
- Make more themes based on the original, in my case four: BWO_one, BWO_space, BWO_invert, Carter’s Line.
- Revise original theme, improving search.php and archives.php; removing the unused and unnecessary files (comment-popup.php, attachment.php, links.php).
- Realize that these changes are important enough to by made in all previous version of the theme.
- Spend far too much time making those changes to the previous versions.
- Write a tutorial (another waste of time) about your foolishness.
I should also be clear that this is a (slight) oversimplification of the process. It glosses over the large number of alterations (usually but not always to the stylesheet) that’s I’ve had to make as well.
I guess this is probably part of the learning process, but it’s making me feel completely silly.